Thursday, November 08, 2012

Taiwanese entrepreneurs leaving US for China?

Chang is representative of the growing number of immigrant entrepreneurs who have begun to seek market opportunities outside the U.S. in the phenomenon called the reverse brain drain. I met him in the course of conducting research for a Kauffman Foundation report on immigrant entrepreneurship, which found that the proportion of immigrant founded-companies in Silicon Valley had dropped from 52.4% to 43.9% since 2005. Significantly, the reverse brain drain has hit Taiwanese entrepreneurship the hardest.

According to our findings, Taiwan has dropped from the fourth top immigrant-founder-sending country to twenty-second since 2005. This translates to a decrease in the proportion of Taiwanese-founded startups from 5.8% to 1.1%. By contrast, the rankings for other top sending countries have remained fairly stable over the decade. The cause for concern for the decline in Taiwanese entrepreneurship in particular is because Taiwanese immigrants historically played such an integral role in the development of the U.S. tech industry, apart from Chinese and Indians.

The pigeons are coming home to roost: elite mismanagement of the US economy, the burgeoning security state, the petty harassment and visa issues by immigration, high costs and indifferent returns, and the higher education bubble. The Obama Administration needs to stop bombing weddings and barbecues in the Middle East, leave Afghanistan to the Chinese, the only beneficiaries of our stupid, criminal war there, and turn the cash to investment in the nation's infrastructure and other urgent needs.

It should also be added that Taipei is now a pretty good place to live, with direct connections to China and cheap flights to other growing Asian economies. Low levels of street crime, universal health insurance, and very low taxes on wealth. Lots of wealthy Taiwanese in the US must be considering a return....._______________________[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

A couple months ago, the Congressional Republicans introduced a bill to give 50,000 visas a year away from the lottery system to give them to that graduates holding Master's degrees and PhD's from American Universities so they could stay in America and do things like starting new high tech businesses. As one would expect the Democrats blocked it.

The Republican bill would have kept immigration levels constant. The Democrats refused saying they couldn't allow high skilled workers to stay unless the bill also raised immigration levels to increase Democratic-leaning demographics.

Readin, the problem was that it ended the lottery and didn't increase immigration numbers. So Dems introduced the same bill but without ending the lottery. as the paper notes, there is broad bipartisan support for the idea of getting tech types to immigrate to the US.

On Tuesday, Charles E. Schumer of New York, the Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary immigration subcommittee, introduced a bill that was close to Ms. Lofgren’s measure, creating a two-year pilot program to give 55,000 new green cards each year to foreign graduates.

Democrats in both houses, especially Hispanic and black lawmakers, are reluctant to end the lottery without some compromise, for example giving additional green cards to family members of legal immigrants already here. Many winners of the lottery, which was created in 1990, come from African countries.

Behind the partisan maneuvering over details, there was notable bipartisan accord — rare in this polarized Congress — on the broad goals of the legislation: to offer visas so science and technology graduates could remain here and start businesses to create jobs.

This is not new news. I work in high tech and mid tech engineering and manufacturing support and we began to see a this early in the year with the current administrations (and congresse's) race to the bottom in terms of all the issues noted in the article you quoted above.

I do no see an immediate change in view unless the obama regime choses to think outside the washington beltway, how to get elected in two year mentality and make long term, substantial efforts to develop and grow technology, manufacturing and education.

It is very disheartening when this trend actually becomes pronounced enough to be in a major financial publication.

Yes, that's what I said. The Democrats were unwilling to consider a bill that kept immigration levels constant. I wrote "The Republican bill would have kept immigration levels constant. The Democrats refused saying they couldn't allow high skilled workers to stay unless the bill also raised immigration levels to increase Democratic-leaning demographics."

he Democrats refused saying they couldn't allow high skilled workers to stay unless the bill also raised immigration levels to increase Democratic-leaning demographics."

The Dem bill didn't "raise" immigration levels. it just didn't delete a currently existing program as the Republican bill did. A few thousand skilled workers hardly constitute a drop in the bucket, immigration-wise.

Those groups used to vote Republican. This kind of ideologically slanted representation of reality is one of the reasons those traditionally Republican groups are beginning to switch sides.

So it is simple math. If you increase one category of immigration without an offsetting decrease in another category, then immigration increases.

The Republican proposal was not an "offsetting" decrease. It was the deletion of a large existing program in exchange for a few thousand persons under the skill program. The Dem proposal did not delete an existing program -- and the offset, if you felt one was necessary -- could be done merely by minor reductions in the immigrant visas granted under the extant program (or some other program). There is no dichotomy here, and the fact that you think there is shows how ideological your conception of the proposals is.

(The same math applies to the budget, if you increase spending somewhere without decreasing it somewhere else, the debt increases.)

Or you could increase revenues. See the problem? It's that dichotomous thinking. Dichotomies are signal of bad analysis and ideological constructs, Readin.

Key quote from the article: "The bill would abolish a lottery run each year that distributes the same number of green cards". The Republican plan was to keep immigration levels constant while pulling making the immigrants more highly educated. The Democrats didn't like the fact that such a plan would reduce the number of future so they killed it.

You could further increase revenues, but of course that would come at the expense of freedom. And it it usually economically unwise to have the government rather than the private sector control more money because the government is not subject to the discipline of the marketplace.

Yes I realize that raising taxes is an option, it's just not a good option.

You could further increase revenues, but of course that would come at the expense of freedom. And it it usually economically unwise to have the government rather than the private sector control more money because the government is not subject to the discipline of the marketplace.

The deeper we go, the deeper we get into these nonsense ideological constructs. I'm going to stop here.

COMMENTS: May take a while. Google screwed up the old Comments functions in its most recent "upgrade" which really hurt the functionality and usability of Blogger, another trademark Google upgrade that made problems worse while adding more clicks to get anything done.

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